Julia Poe of The Chicago Tribune<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cI believe I still can play in the NBA,\u201d Kawamura said following his Summer League debut for Chicago, per Poe. \u201cI want to get a contract \u2014 two-way, whatever. I just want to get a contract.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Second-year Chicago small forward Matas Buzelis, who suited up for the Bulls in a second straight Summer League despite probably having done enough as a rookie to not need the seasoning, raved about what he saw out of the pint-sized point guard.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s the definition of heart over height,\u201d the 6-foot-10 Buzelis said. \u201cHe plays so hard. To be on the floor with him, it means a lot to me. I\u2019m not going to take it for granted because he\u2019s an amazing player and an amazing human.\u201d<\/p>\n
During his five Summer League bouts in Las Vegas, Kawamura notched averages of 10.2 points, 6.2 dimes and 2.2 swipes a night.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, Kawamura will don the jersey number of a recently departed two-time Chicago All-Star: shooting guard Zach LaVine’s No. 8.<\/p>\n
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LaVine was moved to the Sacramento Kings as part of a multi-team exchange.<\/p>\n
Across seven-and-a-half seasons, the UCLA product averaged 24.2 points on .474\/.390\/.834 shooting splits, 4.7 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 0.9 steals a night. He’s a great isolation scorer and shooter, and a respectable supplemental distributor. But a lackluster defensive effort, injury question marks, and a predilection for ball-stopping have made him a difficult player to build around, as Chicago discovered.<\/p>\n
The team made the playoffs exactly once during LaVine’s tenure, when he was clearly just the second-best player on the club behind six-time All-Star swingman DeMar DeRozan, now also his teammate in Sacramento purgatory.<\/p>\n
Kawamura may not have All-Star upside like LaVine did, but his assumption of LaVine’s jersey at least signifies that Chicago is truly moving on from its failed experiment with the 6-foot-5 swingman.<\/p>\n
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MORE NEWS:NBA insider has theory on Josh Giddey, Bulls contract-talks<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A freshly added Chicago Bulls signing is slated to wear an ex-Bulls All-Star’s old jersey number. Following a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[27550,157,7329,8174,18427,27551,27549,19801,27554,19803,19798,355,27552,27548,6404,99,11651,27553,27547,19805,3787],"class_list":["post-33006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-adding-kawamura","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-bulls","tag-cleveland-cavaliers","tag-demar-derozan","tag-isaac-okoro","tag-jersey-number","tag-josh-giddey","tag-lachlan-olbrich","tag-lonzo-ball","tag-matas-buzelis","tag-nba","tag-noa-essengue","tag-point-guard","tag-sacramento-kings","tag-sports","tag-summer-league","tag-tre-jones","tag-windy-city-bulls","tag-yuki-kawamura","tag-zach-lavine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}